Hello all,

I've started working on a new story, and I realized part way through that I needed to develop a bit about what I think Bill's job as a "curse-breaker" is.

Now, I have my own ideas that will be published sometime soon, but I was wondering what you all thought about it.

Do you lean towards jbern's ideas? Or something completely different?

 

Canonically, becoming a Curse-Breaker requires a knowledge of Arithmancy. There is no indication of a knowledge of Ancient Runes, so it does not seem that Runes are canonically integral. I suspect that Curse-Breaking in canon involves deciphering the numerical properties of particular spells placed on objects, whatever those properties are since Arithmancy isn't really spelled out in HP, and then using them to "unravel" the spell or something. That's all I can get from canon and it might be a refreshing way to approach Curse-Breaking, rather than the typical albeit intriguing way of using Runes as a path to Curse-Breaking.

There is a hint to an idea of what Arithmantical applications look like in practice, albeit not for Cursebreaking. For instance, Voldemort divides his soul into seven pieces among six Horcruces, both immensely magically powerful numbers. Many potions require a specific number of turns. So, try using something along that route if you want to avoid the typical "Curse-Breaking = runes" approach.

EDIT: Voldemort intended to divide his soul into seven pieces among six Horcruces. Potter's Scar Horcrux made it seven Horcruces and eight pieces, rather Voldemort's intended six Horcruces and seven pieces. Potential Arithmantical plot in the making? Maybe, maybe not.

 

Perhaps you use arithmancy to break down the energy field, like introducing instability?

Of course, if the arithmancy-scripting sequence is done with ancient runes instead of current numbers, then you need to know runes.

 

I'd like to avoid runes as much as possible, if to keep it as original as possible.

I imagine it might look something like this, to extrapolate from a stipulated Arthimantical scenario:

You have the Gaunt's Ring and there's currently a curse that will literally eat apart anyone unlucky enough to put on the ring. There are magical spells placed on it in regular numeric patterns - almost like magical cryptography. So, an actual Curse might be made of numerous tiny little "magical strands" and Breaking the Curse simply requires you break it apart somehow. So, maybe, three particular Curses are entwined in a specific numeric way: a Withering Curse cast thrice, a Permanence Spell cast twice, and a Binding Spell cast once. Maybe by casting spells to separate the individual magical components according to their number i.e. perhaps casting the counter to the Permanence spell eight times by taking the number of times the Permanence spell was cast to the power of the total number of types of "magical strands" i.e. 2^3 = 8. This is a simplistic example but here's an albeit amateurish example of approaching Cursebreaking without using Runes. More thinking into the matter will naturally produce better ways of fleshing out the process and creating a way to use some sort of Arithmancy or pseudo-cryptography to approaching Curse-Breaking. Some useful somewhat canonical (canonical insofar as we're using Arithmancy, not Runes, for Curse-Breaking; non-canonical insofar as we're making everything else up) terminology might be the analogy of encryption and decryption. A Curse unites particular magical strands in a particular order, sometimes an order one cannot see i.e. encryption. Whereas Breaking a Curse might involve "unraveling" the particular magical pattern i.e. decryption. This leads to a number of useful cryptological analogues like one-time pads = Unbreakable Curses and other such things.

 

Hold your horses there Rayndeon. You're assuming that nobody knows what this mysterious "Arithmancy" actually is, and making it up on the spot. Not to worry, here's a brief explanation.

Curse-Breaking is all about breaking curses. Perhaps if it indeed requires Arithmancy in canon (where does it say this) then it may involve learning the spell's incantations and creating their sigils from there, and therefore "knowing" the curse allows one to dispel it. Likewise it could be about learning the caster's name, or creating one giant sigil from all the curses present in order to break all the curses. Remember we heard that Bill was working on Egyptian tombs, with all these "wicked curses from Egyptian wizards". I don't believe it would be nearly as complicated mathimatically as you're suggesting.

 

That is the actual definition of Arithmancy. We have no idea whether or not it matches up to Rowling's definition of it. Arithmancy is simply defined as the study of the magical properties of numbers. Rowling clearly seems to consider this distinct from mere Divination, along with Hermione - who stated that Arithmancy was her favorite subject while she detested Divination. So, it is unclear at best and at worst false that Arithmancy is a branch of divination, albeit with numbers. For instance, in various fantasy tales, necromancy refers to the art of raising the dead, life force, etc, whereas properly, necromancy is merely divination with the dead - nothing more, nothing less. The same may well apply here. And given Hermione's fondness for Arithmancy and her detest of Divination, I suspect that it may well be the case.

As for Arithmancy being required for Curse-Breaking, it's in Order of the Phoenix, Chapter 29, Career Advice. It's the scene where Ron, Hermione, and Harry are looking at different pamphlets for what career they're going to pursue. You can also find a reference at HPL here.

 

One idea: Curse-breaking is a euphemism for the sort of Indiana Jones tomb looting that modern-day archaeologists would froth at the mouth to witness. That it's goblins at the helm indicates that they only care about the profit involved and not documenting past generations, so it could easily be a very morally indefensible occupation.

Another idea: the goblins have a veeeeeery long backlog of unpaid debts. Like, thousands of years long. Breaking into tombs and walking out with everything inside is just debt collection to them, since the owner of the tomb didn't repay his loans to whatever banks existed at the time, and the debts got bought or inherited by various institutions until they ended up being owned by Gringotts.

 

Very interesting ideas, Tehan, and I like them both.

Particularly the second one, which is quite original - canonically, the goblins consider anything made by goblins to belong to them once the "loan" to the original purchaser was up - perhaps many of these tombs contain "goblin property"?

 

Jbern's idea is interesting and fun. I lean towards that.

About Arithmancy, I lean more towards Harry Potter and the Golden Needle, can't remember who wrote that fic but that idea seems much more educational and you actually learn something, rather than just read another work of fanfiction that just rots your brain.

Though I guess most of us are guitly as charged for reading things that are probably negatively effecting us.

 

I think I wrote this in another thread once, but I see arithmancy's place in curse-breaking to be something of a magical Cost-Benefit Analysis.

Say you have curse X. You need to break curse X to get to treasure. To break this curse you'll need a counter curse. But which counter curse to use? You may even need to invent a whole new one. Arithmancy, being the prediction of the future through numbers, is really just glorified extrapolation of statistics, in my view. The curse-breaker uses arithmancy to predict which counter-curse will work best against the curse he is confronted with.

 

This shit is sort of hard core...

If you put 'Avada Kedavra' into an arithmancy calculator you get:

Character Number: 1
Heart Number: 1
Social Number: 9

The number 1 represents an individual unit. It also represents domination. The number 9 represents a completion to the fullest degree, along with arrogance and loneliness.

Therefore, you could easily say that the Avada Kedavra spell is both an individual, dominating force and a spell that simply completes the horcrux ritual (arrogance, loneliness, voldemort).

And, on the matter of one spell overcoming another spell, there is a lot of things you could say about that when you look at the numbers that come out of the calculator.

Avada Kedavra - 1, 1, and 9: solitary unit, leader, completion. This spell kills anything it comes in contact with. It cannot be blocked by any other spell. This spell ends a fight.

Stupefy - 4, 8, and 5: stable, unpredictable, unstable. This spell is one of the spells in the books that had the widest range of effects. It is easily blocked, easily countered, but it is also easy to cast and disables an opponent completely. This spell would be used as a bread and butter sort of spell because it has such random effects. It is not strong or weak or medium. It can have strong, weak, and medium effects.

Expelliarmus - 2, 5, and 6: balance, uncertainty, and reliability. This spell is the same as stupefy. But, then again, you could say it is two-way communication, imbalance, and family-orientation, which makes me laugh, as this is the spell that caused the priori incantatem.

Crucio - 6, 9, and 6: reliability and completion. This spell would be a reliable one to use often. Even if you have never cast it before, like Harry, it will still put someone down. And, with enough time under it, someone can go insane.

I could go on, but I'm getting tired of typing. I just wanted to share the amusing ways you could read all of this. No wonder Hermione liked it so much...

 

Pretty interesting. I like the idea of doing something a little different with curse-breaking, but Arithmancy seems like it would be only the beginning of the curese-breaking process. Runes may or may not be involved, as it's a stylistic choice in this instance, but you'd probably have to emphasize other parts of spellwork/magic, too. I'm looking forward to seeing what you come up with, kmf.

 

That sounds like a very neat idea. If you combine it with something like the "magic as word" theory in Earthsea, that might really work. For some other interesting tidbits:

Protego: 6,8,7. Reliable, practical, challenge. This spell is your basic bread and butter defense, is reliable and consistent, and up for most challenges.

Protego Horribilis: 8,5,3. Practical, change, completeness. This spell is far more powerful, complete protection, able to handle the many changing-forms of complex magic, especially the Dark Arts.

Protego Totalum: 9, 9, 9. This is the ultimate in defense, offering complete, utter protection in the highest degree possible.

My idea of Protego is that it protects against magic and physical impact once before dissipating. If we consider that (in terms of fan fiction), Contego to offer the same protection as Protego, except that it does not dissipiate necessarily in one go -

Contego: 7,8,8. Challenge, practical, success. This is twice as useful than Protego, as it will last and protect against multiple threats.

Contego Horribilis: 9,5,4. Completeness, change, stability. This offers greater, complete protection against myriad forms of magic and is very stable and useful, especially against the Dark Arts.

Contego Totalum: 1,9,1. Individual, completeness, focused. This will block utterly anything (except an AK), offering complete entire protection, but requires great individual effort and focus to keep up, unlike a Protego Totalum which dissipates in one go.

As Heir said, maybe Hermione didn't have bad taste after all. This type of Arithmancy, I think, would only work if you combine it with something like le Guin's Earthsea-style magic, wherein particular syllables and words in particular combinations result in particular magical effects. This lends itself very naturally to Arithmancy - by particular Arithmancy decoding, one can create spells by combining syllables and letters in a particular way or by having particular magical effects, and figuring out the syllables and letters (and hence the incantation) needed to cast it or dispel it.